The Impact of Funding Modalities on the Performance of Indigenous Organisations

Governments’ choice of funding modality can produce powerful incentives for organisations to perform in preferred ways, but it can also divert limited resources, narrow accountability, and undermine capability. Through literature review and interviews, the research explored the international literature on public finance management in developing country contexts, and compared this to case studies of Indigenous organisations. The situation in Australia was found to differ in three ways: (1) performance indicators are imposed, rather than negotiated; (2) few existing public funding modalities reward performance or provide incentives; and (3) funding arrangements do not generally require receiving organisations to be accountable to their constituents. Stability and durability of funding modalities, and clarity in functions and jurisdictional boundaries, were also found to positively influence performance. Further research is required to design new performance frameworks that build around the organisation, rather than the grant, with indicators of governance capability and downward accountability to constituents.     

Because coconuts do not grow in Canberra: Complexity theory and capacity development in Solomon Islands Police Force

Statebuilding has been informed and captured by reductionist, linear change models. Defined by technocratic approaches to public sector (re)building and reform—it has been monitored, measured and evaluated by New Public Management artefacts such as log‐frames and Results‐Based Management. Through a case study on the capacity development of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force, I explore the possibilities for using complexity theory to better understand, manage, and monitor capacity development interventions. The analysis of interview data with police practitioners from both sides of the intervention—advisors and local counterparts—reveals the explanatory power of complexity concepts (such as interconnectedness, emergence, initial conditions, and non‐linear change) in ways that could inform a rethink of how we frame public sector capacity building interventions.     

The Catastrophic Link Between the Importance and Extremity of Political Attitudes

The catastrophe theory of attitudes (Latané and Nowak, 1994) predicts that unimportant attitudes act as continuous dimensions, with normal distributions and gradual changes in evaluation, while important attitudes act as categories, with bipolar or unipolar extreme distributions and catastrophic (abrupt) changes in evaluation. A major derivation from this theory is that attitude importance and extremity should be correlated, with more important attitudes being more extreme. This prediction was confirmed for 14 specific political issues at both the group and the individual level, as well as for political involvement and general liberalism. However, general political involvement was not related to the extremity of evaluation for specific issues; similarly, partisanship predicted extremity of general liberalism but not extremity on specific issues. Results suggest that attitude importance and extremity must be measured at corresponding levels of specificity in order for a relationship between them to hold. These results have implications for attitude change in both individuals and societies.